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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2042 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I notice that there's a line on the Contact Us page reading:

"If you can see this line, we haven't been contacted by any law enforcement or governmental organizations in 2023 yet."

That's the problem with actively updated, passively triggered warrant canaries; it's hard to tell if their absence is meaningful or the result of forgetting to update it. They are on more solid legal grounds than passively updated, actively triggered canaries (those that require editing the page to remove the canary to trigger), but at least those latter ones are not accidentally triggered.

Has everyone else been seeing this kind of cadence, short sentences and contrasting statements? I keep seeing this and thinking AI. How do others see it? Do you think it's suddenly become more prominent too?

The plan was smart:

•ISVs to move rifle squads quickly

•LRVs to give Cavalry squadrons mobility and sensors

•M10 Bookers to restore firepower to the dismounted fight. It wasn’t perfect, but it made the IBCT relevant again.

Now the Army has canceled the M10. The LRV is nowhere in sight. And what’s left? An “MBCT” concept with no protected firepower, no recon platform, and a few light vehicles. This isn’t transformation. It’s disarmament.

The M10 solved a real problem. So did the LRV. Killing the platforms without replacing the capability isn’t reform. It’s regression.

This feels totally AI to me. And not just AI, this is ChatGPT. Especially the contrasting statements -- ChatGPT loves those. It's not a style. It's a fingerprint.

Hey! You're just pretending to be ChatGPT—I can tell by the way your text is.

Self-demonstrating post?

Somewhere, @urquan sighs.

More of a joke, I guess -- I wrote it, but I intentionally added the contrasting statements.

It screams AI to me. I've used most models enough on writing, both fictional and not, to know some of their hallmarks. The bit you've highlighted makes me groan a little every time I catch it in the wild.

It's not that there aren't real humans who write that way, but these days, my money is on an LLM.

I rarely use ChatGPT compared to Claude or Deepseek so I can't recognize it that well, it felt a little Deepseek to me but then Deepseek is a fair bit like ChatGPT and one hardly expects US military commentators to use Deepseek. Deepseek gives me stuff like:

Silence.

Then—pandemonium.

Or:

The road to the Black Tower was long.

And her vengeance?

Beginning.

Slop!

I primarily use Gemini, but in my experience it's endemic to all LLMs (except maybe Claude, but I hardly use that these days). It's not as glaring as em-dashes, but I still notice.

Praying Altman releases that fine-tuned model designed for creative writing someday. The demand is clearly there.

Related to this, I've noticed that various webnovel authors seem to be using the same LLM for describing high society activities and products that they likely have little to no personal experience with.

Well, its either that or they're doing a remarkable job at copying each others style but only in this particular area...

Way back in the GPT 3.5 days, I used ChatGPT to translate my plain text of a character's dialogue to Jamaican patois.

I was a bit embarrassed when, about a year later, an actual Jamaican reader read my novel and left a comment exclaiming how surprised he was regarding the authenticity of the Jamaican slang used. Far too rare on the internet, and almost never so well, he told me, and asked if I asked a Jamaican speaker. I told him that I'd done my "research", which was half-true. Well, I guess it worked as intended.

Here it's more uncanny valley stuff imo. The correct words are used but it comes off as a status insecure under/working class person studying up before going to the best restaurant in town, trying to impress their boss/date/family with words they learned an hour ago. Its barely a step up from ordering "your most expensive wine".

This is of course fine when that is what's literally happening in the story but it rarely if ever is.

I used to see that a fair bit back when I was reading bloggers who were trained in marketing. My impression is that it's a reasonably common and effective style, though not on the message boards I prefer, such as this one.

I could see it becoming less effective in the near future as it becomes associated with AI; AI draining dry the collective pool of effective rhetoric.

"DeepSeek, translate this to the 56th level of not looking like AIslop."

Apropos of a very small, tangential discussion on the main culture war thread, what are the borders of polyamory?

For me personally, I don’t think of any variation of one man/x number of women as actually being polyamorous in the current year sense. It’s all just gradations between patriarch with +1 wife, or a mistresses situation, or a full on Ottoman seraglio.

I can’t say I base this on much more than vibes, but modern polyamory seems to connote at least one additional male in the mix, and probably something that tends towards more even mixes of men and women.

Just because a particular form of polyamory happens to historically predate the modern polyamory movement, and be less toxic than most other examples of the category, doesn't seem to be a knockdown argument for excluding it from the category.

By analogy: we don't stop counting plumbing as “infrastructure” or “technology” just because the Romans had it, or because it doesn't lend itself easily to infinitely scrolling AI-generated feeds.

It's still irritating and anachronistic. It's like describing Da Vinci as an LGBTQ+ artist.

I think we had this discussion before, when someone disputed Aella's definition of "you're polyamorous if you're fine with your partner having other partners". Which looks like it's turning the definition inside out, but is actually useful for separating the sheep from the goats, that is, the polycules from the harems.

So an arrangement where a single patriarch has multiple wives is not a polycule unless there's an agreement that these wives are free to seek relationships with other men without terminating the current one. Maybe their husband is just such a fine specimen that they have no need for another partner right now (insert the quote about a woman blowing a man in a brothel not necessarily being a prostitute).

I feel like it still counts as modern polyamory if the one-man-harem situation involves the women openly having lesbian relationships with each other and/or additional outside women. And I want to emphasize the "openly" part, the lesbian activities being openly acknowledged rather than something others maybe suspect but turn a blind eye to.

I personally suspect that this is not actually a modern innovation on harems per se, and that the reason we don't have extensive records of it in the ancient world is that it was considered irrelevant trivia, not that it was considered forbidden. Contrary to male homosexual behavior (which is likelier to be an outright aberration that natural selection simply has trouble weeding out, comparable to mental illness), it seems like the most obvious context that female homosexual behavior would evolve for - particularly given that women are much likelier to be bisexual than men.

One Penis Policies are the most common format of polyamory seen in the real world. It might not be the most pure form of poly or the most honored form of poly in theory but it's the most common, so it seems like it would be odd to define it out of the community.

It also seems odd to call such a scenario monogamy, which would be the implication if one defined it out of polyamory.

In my mind polyamory is defined by:

-- Some degree of social and public openness about the nature of one's relationships.

-- Open Acceptance of the arrangement by all partners involved, with at least some degree of lip service to the idea that this is a positive arrangement for all involved.

So cheating isn't polyamory on either count, but a two ladies, and I'm the only man does, polygyny being a subcategory.

This is so fascinating!

I would not call a one penis policy monogamy. But it’s also not polyamory, at least not as I understand the essence of the concept. It’s just regular old polygamy on the euphemism treadmill.

That’s why it’s so interesting that you have reason to believe it’s the most common format. On the rare occasions I run into openly polyamorous relationships, they are almost always one woman/two or more men. It’s hard to phrase the apparent dynamics charitably because they have been pretty clearly moderately attractive woman+beta wallet cuck+jobless alpha chad. If it’s not that kind of relationship, then it’s sloppy low-class, low-status trailer park relationships being dressed up as a “polycule.”

Inasmuch as I think of those latter two types as being something distinct enough from polygamy to have their own technical term, I think one penis policies are just something very old coming out, inevitably, but having to dress itself in modern clothing, as it were, even if the clothes don’t fit well or at all.

It’s just regular old polygamy on the euphemism treadmill.

I guess we're at crossed wires here on the definition of and the distinction between Polygamy and Polyamory. Polygamy refers to having more than one spouse, while Polyamory refers to having more than one lover. Polygamy refers only to situations in which one is, at minimum, establishing a mutual household if not claiming marriage; while Polyamory refers to any kind of relationship structure in which one party approves of the other party having an additional lover. I'm not sure what your working definition is; as far as I can tell (meant without insult) it's something like "Annoying thing that Annoying cucks on the internet won't stop Annoying me about." Which might be a good definition for most of the times you've run into it online!

Where I've run into IRL couples who label themselves Poly, the most common types in order of appearance are:

-- Theoretically "open" relationships with a 1PP where the woman is supposedly Bisexual and free to sleep with other women but never really has the get up and go to find a woman; and the man is free to sleep with other women in the case of a threesome but isn't hot enough to find one easily while his wife is kind of half-assing it; and it never happens and they're always nosing around "poly" and "kink" and "Queer" events trying to find a third. These are the ones everyone else complains about because they're annoying.

-- The above, but the couple is hot and/or rich and the woman is genuinely bisexual, and therefore find thirds regularly, who they include as an auxiliary member in their relationship for a period of time before shuffling them out. In this case, a 1PP is the stable equilibrium, because a hot woman can find other women about as easily as a hot man can find other women.

-- True "Open" relationships in which both partners are free to pursue other lovers as they choose and are doing so. They tend to just be a glide path to breaking up, or very loosely attached to begin with. Tend to break down due to gender imbalances, because a woman of any given quality can find a man much more easily than a man of a similar quality can find a woman.

-- Polyandry in which one woman and multiple male partners play house. Normally a degenerate form of the above, in which the men are theoretically empowered to look elsewhere but don't.

In all cases, the defining aspect of a polyamorous relationship is the acceptance on the part of one's partner that one is allowed to have additional lovers.

True "Open" relationships in which both partners are free to pursue other lovers as they choose and are doing so. They tend to just be a glide path to breaking up, or very loosely attached to begin with. Tend to break down due to gender imbalances, because a woman of any given quality can find a man much more easily than a man of a similar quality can find a woman.

I agree that this is probably just a glide path to breaking up, but I'm not sure if the dynamics are different for men and women. Sure, women might find it easier to find a man willing to sleep with them, but men are usually more motivated and less selective.

Before I respond in any kind of more substantive way, I will throw out there that I don’t think we’re really at crossed wires.

Polygamy is illegal in the United States. My take is that relationships that would be polygamous under a different legal regime just retitle themselves as polyamorous and go without the official legal imprimatur of marriage despite being long-term mutual households, and being essentially patriarchal “one dude, multiple women” setups. That’s what I mean about them being polygamy on the euphemism treadmill. It’s just patriarchal (which is good, IMO!) dynamics accruing to themselves some woke cover. It’s all very fascinating to me, honestly.

To me, harem-type setups have something distinctly different about them, in essence, compared to the types you mention above.

My take is that relationships that would be polygamous under a different legal regime just retitle themselves as polyamorous and go without the official legal imprimatur of marriage despite being long-term mutual households, and being essentially patriarchal “one dude, multiple women” setups.

I suppose that is possible, but I haven't really encountered it. Generally where you have the rich man keeping a harem on hand, they make no bones about not liking each other and being unhappy about the arrangement, even if Mahomet said it was ok, accepting it as their lot only for lack of a better option. Polyamory is defined by the multiple women having positive, if not necessarily Sapphic, feelings for one another.

What polyamory has largely replaced is old fashioned adultery.

...It's still adultery, though, in the completely literal sense of 'having sex with people other than your spouse'. Plenty of historical wives understood that their husbands would have mistresses, too(after all, it beats having a husband who's poor).

I think the good old fashioned affair has gone into decline.

When my dad and I drive down a certain highway about 50 minutes south of me, he always points out a house and says "That's where used to put up his mistress and their secret kids."

You don't see that much these days at the small town Pennsylvania level.

Secrets of that magnitude are somewhat more difficult to keep these days.

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Definitionally, sure, but I think it's connotationally out.

Why not just use the terms that exist, like polyandry or cuckoldry or open marriage?

At least to me, polyamory is defined by treating sex & romance as just another part of a friendship where you can have different degrees and kinds of sexual relationships with many different people, which can also change quite fast. A fixed group of say 4 guys and 5 girls living together, having kids together, etc. would imo be more aptly described as a commune. And, as you say, 1 man/x woman is 99% just a harem in practice.

Ironically, this is also why polyamory is imo by far the worst for a functioning society; It's basically expanding the dating period of many young people's life to the entirety, with all the anxieties, drama and labor it entails. If you have work & kids, you just don't have time for that. Since work is usually necessary for all but the richest, that means you skip the kids. Communes often have similar problems but to a lesser degree, and as long as they're not too large and have clear boundaries to everything else, can be made to work. I don't like the intrinsic inequality stemming from Harems, but from a practical PoV they work just as well as traditional couples since the boundaries and expectations are simple and clear.

Yeah, I had the exact same thought. Nobody thinks of the Saudi prince as 'polyamorous'.

Surely that's more to do with the cultural coercion affecting his “brides”? cf. Elon Musk's quasi-harem, the sheer exploitativeness and power asymmetry seems to disqualify it from really counting as a mutually constructed "romantic" relationship...

I do, he's not monogamous or celibate. But I think the interesting question is, What about serial monogamy?

It occurs to me that the term "serial monogamy" is very directly analogous to "crony capitalism". Or "social justice", for that matter.

Is it just, like, straight-up illegal to get anonymous STD testing in Alabama?

https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/title-22/title-1/chapter-11a/article-1/section-22-11a-14/

Any physician who diagnoses … a case of sexually transmitted disease as designated by the State Board of Health, … shall report … to the state or county health officer … the patient’s full name, date of birth, … address, telephone number, … stage of disease, … and the date of onset.

Or is there some workaround where a physician or clinic can “give you the tools for diagnosis” without being the one to diagnose you?

Hmm, the situation in 1998 was thus:

https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/60366-cdc-recommends-all-states-make-anonymous-hiv-testing-available

Anonymous testing is currently available in all but 11 states.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/188098

Currently, 40 states have publicly funded anonymous testing sites for HIV, …

… anonymous testing contributes at a population level to early HIV testing and medical care. Thus, … public health departments should maintain and in some instances enhance the broad availability of anonymous testing options.

but I can't find any such up-to-date surveys.

I'm annoyed just how much focus there is on "accessibility"; the impression I get from the articles I had to slog through even to find these was that if it isn't taxpayer-subsidized with a $0 copay it may as well not exist...

Lots of so-called “confidential” processes are very much not confidential or anonymous once you dig into the fine print. Never tell your psychiatrist that you’ve had suicidal thoughts unless you want to be committed.

I would be surprised if that's how it actually worked in the US.

At least in the UK, admitting suicidal ideation isn't a route to involuntary commitment by itself. I'd know, I've told my GP and psychiatrist about mine. All the cases I've seen admitted sought admission themselves, and it's only involuntary in situations such as someone found during/after a suicide attempt, and even then we can't hold them for very long. Patient autonomy counts for a lot here.

If you tell a shrink that you're having thoughts about offing yourself, they'll likely attempt to treat depression. If you tell them you've got the knife and a note ready, then that's a whole different kettle of fish.

Yep, that's my worry exactly. If a professional knows your legal name, or could easily learn it, then any so-called ““““confidentiality””” seems to just become a marketing gimmick meaning they probably won't publish you as a case study, post about it on social media, or talk about you on-the-record with medical professionals not working at the same provider.

I wrote a long comment here but I ended up deleting because their were too many edge cases and complexity but the short version is:

  1. If a healthcare facility or employee abuses your personal information in ANY.WAY. the government will absolutely anally violate anyone involved with several rusty implements. They are extremely aggressive about this to the point where it has become counterproductive and directly harms patient care (ex: nobody wants to send care-critical records to anyone for fear of being beaten with the HIPAA spoon). Exceptions exist but are for the most part extremely well validated.

  2. The above poster is not giving good advice. Having suicidal thoughts is not grounds for commitment. While some health systems are overly aggressive with commitment (so it is a real problem) tons of people are sent home from the hospital or leave their doctor's office after expressing suicidal thoughts. Something like a plan for how you would kill yourself is not the same thing.

Having suicidal thoughts and not telling your doctor or people in your life is for the obvious reasons much more dangerous to you.

If a healthcare facility or employee abuses your personal information in ANY.WAY. the government will absolutely anally violate anyone involved with several rusty implements.

"Abuse" is a matter of opinion; HIPAA means they can disclose it only with the patient's "consent".

Have you ever found a single healthcare provider whose notice of privacy practices contained no clauses which were written to include consent to share health information with an open-ended, undisclosed set of 3rd parties? Please share, if you have.

https://www.uabmedicine.org/legal/notice-of-health-information-practices/

We may use and disclose your medical information to tell you about or recommend possible treatment options or alternatives that may be of interest to you.

… We may use and disclose medical information to tell you about health-related benefits or services that may be of interest to you.

… There are some services provided in UAB Health System through contracts with business associates. Examples include a copy service we use when making copies of your health record, consultants, accountants, lawyers, medical transcriptionists, and third-party billing companies. When these services are contracted, we may disclose your health information to our business associate so that they can perform the job we’ve asked them to do. To protect your health information, however, we require the business associate to appropriately safeguard your information.

What do you imagine happens with this information?

Research for instance requires patient direct informed consent or your data to be totally anonymized. Your privacy is protected, although someone else may benefit from having cared for you.

Some information needs to be given to your insurance for instance so they can pay, that's the primary point of boilerplate like this.

To give an example of how restricted and scary HIPAA is - you do not require patient consent to reach out to a patient's primary care doctor to gather information on the patient. This is important because most patient's struggle to remember all of their health history, their medications, the results of recent lab tests you wouldn't necessarily want to duplicate, imaging results and so on.

Despite this most systems will require patient consent to be faxed to them anyway, even in situations where the patient is say, not able to consent due to illness severity.

If health systems are willing to let quality of care be damaged how free with your information do you think they are?

Sure, a hospital, and maybe my doctor, is going to put on this big show of paranoia when it comes to disclosing my PII to each other.

But if I have definitely "legally" given them "consent" to give my PII and PHI to 3rd-parties that I'm not even able to learn the names of, what reason do I have to think that those 3rd-parties will take similar "precautions"? The only thing those 3rd-parties have to do is make sure they don't literally have my legal name in the same CSV file as any specific diagnoses when they get hacked, and I'll be none the wiser.

My workplace offers as a benefit genetic cancer screening. I thought this would be a neat thing to check out, since I'm really unsure how much of the skin and breast cancer in my extended family is just due to their shitty lifestyle. But the screening company's privacy policy did not inspire confidence, so I sent them this e-mail:

  1. How do I opt out of “Health Information Exchange” sharing?

  2. How can I know when my information is used for “Research”?

    • How can I get copies of the IRB approval?

    • If the final research paper is paywalled, are the involved patients entitled to a free copy of it? 😁

  3. I see that you share patient health information with an undeclared list of Service Providers, Medical Providers, Public Health Authorities, Other Parties, Business Partners, Affiliates, Subsidiaries, Advertising Partners, and various "API and SDK providers".

    Assuming you maintain records of this sharing, how could I request a complete account of it, including:

    • Exactly what information was shared;
    • The legal name and address of the 3rd party the information was shared with;
    • The date the information was shared;
    • The specific purposes for which the information was shared;
    • Any specific constraints on when the 3rd party must delete the information;
    • A complete list of “4th parties” the 3rd party is authorized to share my information to, including legal name and address?

The reply I got back did not address most of my questions, and only claimed that

  1. they don't actually traffick information to HIEs at this time (that was just boilerplate from the privacy policy they blindly copy-pasted from a legal document repository);
  2. all their studies are done internally at this time; and
  3. "[Our company] does not sell or share any information ... with any advertising partners. We will be updating our Privacy Policy to ensure it accurately reflects our commitment to protecting your data and maintaining our trust."

(This was 3 months ago, but their posted privacy policy still explicitly states, "We may disclose your Personal Information with advertising partners.")

Sure, a hospital, and maybe my doctor, is going to put on this big show of paranoia when it comes to disclosing my PII to each other.

I can tell you it's not a show, if I'm in an elevator talking about "John Doe" or even like Dingle McCringleberry the nursing administration gestapo are going to crawl straight up my rectum.

I suspect the rest of your stuff would be resolved if you actually talked to someone who knew what they were talking about and wasn't worried about covering their ass (for instance an HIE in this context probably refers to routine health record sharing that you want in case you are in a car accident in another city).

Granted something like 23 and Me is a different story.

I'm considering selling a bunch of stock tomorrow. The tariffs appear to be real and not going away super soon. Tensions tend to build and reach a fever pitch in the summer and judging by the Karmelo Anthony/Shiloh Hendrix stuff and Trump in the White House I'm expecting this summer to be a mess. My intuition is telling me things are only going down from here. Markets in Asia have already opened way down for Monday. Sell in May sounds like a great idea.

Will definitely dump my share of Amazon. Apple got an exemption from tariffs and I'm sure they make enough of their revenue from non-hardware that I'm thinking of staying with Apple and the rest of the tech companies. Kind of tempted to just dump everything else honestly because I have such a sour outlook on the economy in the short term but I'm also up so much that I don't want to pay a ton in taxes. I might hedge my bets and sell half or less of whatever I'm worried about and then try and buy once markets have crashed. I planned to keep 10% of my portfolio in cash (earning interest) but my 10% has shrunk as the rest of the portfolio has grown around it so I could always use a bit more cash.

I guess my small-scale question is how bad of an idea would it be to liquidate everything I own tomorrow?

I would copy the cash to investment ratio of Buffet. So not a full retreat but liquidate some.

It depends on so much... How much do you know about the market, valuation etc.? What's your investment horizon? What's your ratio between net worth : monthly savings amount : monthly spending amount? What type of accounts are these held in (e.g. how much of a tax hit will you take selling?) Do you plan to stay in the US indefinitely? What would you do with the money instead? (Bonds are trash, although e.g. dollar denominated Turkish corporate debt is quite interesting right now. USD will be inflated away, which hard assets protect against - but US equities are not generally such hard assets, primarily valued for good will and imputed future growth. Vice stocks (BTI) and certain small industrial companies (PPSX, HNRG) are nice. I'm a long term commodities bull, but the macro's complex and Trump's policies might as well be designed to destroy the energy industry so I can't recommend favorites like (VALE, PBR.A).

I've personally been almost 100% in the other widow maker (junior gold miners) for about a year and a half, since the regional banks rerated. There's still a long room to go (with many companies' earnings equal to their market caps) as gold's doubled while most are much cheaper than in 2021 - but the margin of safety's declined. More importantly, you can't hold a commodity producer for a long time, requiring future selling - which would require you to understand them well enough to correctly exit. That adds tax complexities, depending on account type etc.

You should probably not do anything. Funnily, APL is the one I would most strongly suggest you exit.

I think it’s a terrible idea. But if you’re going to do it you should have a very specific number at which you acknowledge you were right and buy back in for cheaper (or else you’ll watch the recovery while waiting for more down movement until prices are above what you sold them for).

Then come up with a number at which you will admit you were wrong and buy back in (or else watch it run away and pray for a pullback that may never come.)

Personally I don’t think we’ll see S&P 500 below 5300 ever again. Wall Street really didn’t want it below 5500 and it took something massive like liberation day to break past it in the first place.

The temperature has gone way down on wall street since the pause, and we found Trump’s pain tolerance limit. And China cannot wait us out—our economy is just better.

Pretty good idea, I have a lot in cash and defensive stocks atm myself. This paper argues that you should only invest at ATH and bail when the going gets tough.

Don’t liquidate everything. Cigarette stocks, at the minimum, do well in a recession.

I'm thinking about trimming my equity exposure as well. I can't in good concience reccomend liquidating everything. Can you imagine missing the "AGI has been achieved internally (but for real this time)" rally?

So, what are you reading?

Still on the Iliad and Lovecraft. Picking up Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Still trying to separate the chaff from the wheat in LitRPG and adjacent, I finished Mother of Learning and started The Wandering Inn. Mother of Learning was great, not quite high literature but among the best, most consistent world-building I have ever seen in fantasy so far. I was mildly annoyed by some parts of the story and it's kind of obvious that the author struggles to write anything but aspergers with different preferences, but that's something I just accept as a given at this point for good fantasy/SF.

The Wandering Inn, on the other hand, is trash, at least to my preferences. It's defenders are correct that there is nothing quite like it, so if you like that kind of thing it is probably unreplaceable. But it is best described as "juvenile progressive Soap Opera in Medieval Fantasy", which doesn't really appeal to me much. The world and the characters don't really seem to follow consistent rules except for whatever random thing the author wants to contrive to happen next for the purpose of drama or to make some point.

And one specific thing was especially grating and repeated itself over and over: First, I notice that the MC behaves stupidly. This is fine, if lampshaded properly. Even other characters in-story explicitly mention that yes, this is stupid. Then I go look up online discussions of the event in question and even the defenders of the MC basically just say yeah, this is stupid, what did you expect of a teenage girl teleported into medieval fantasy? So I read further, and ... the MC turns out basically right. And again, and again. It's frustrating.

I finished Mother of Learning

I'd like to recommend nobody103's next serial, Zenith of Sorcery but I just can't do that in good faith. We're now two years into writing with 23 published chapters and it barely feels like the plot is maybe about get started within the next half dozen chapters. If we're lucky.

So what I'll instead do is recommend you take a look at Void Herald's writings, particularly The Perfect Run. There's a reason it's #2 on Royal Road right below Mother of Learning. If you want more fantasy bent with comedy, the same author's Vainqueur The Dragon is a hoot but you'll have to do some googling to find the full story as pdf.

If you aren’t yet burned out on time loop, although it’s unfinished and the first loop takes like 20 chapters to happen, The Years of Apocalypse is also very good and in some ways better! Might be up your alley given those criticisms.

Sorry, I should have mentioned: Currently I'm only listening to audiobooks, since it allows me to do household chores, cycle, etc. simultaneously. With small kids + full time work I don't really have time to properly read. The limited spare time I have I unfortunately already waste on substack/theMotte. But it sounds interesting enough that it will go on the list of things to read later.

unfinished

*ongoing

"Unfinished" has a connotation of "abandoned" that is not warranted here.

This is the kind of minor pedantry I actually appreciate!

Well, it's important in context. Many people aren't interested in reading stories that are expected to remain unfinished, but are fine with following ongoing stories as they approach completion.

I read Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde last week. Very entertaining and remarkably well-structured, even when you know the twist. Having read lots of Lovecraft, I can now properly contextualise him within the Gothic horror lineage (although my understanding is that he wrote his stories in a self-consciously retro style, almost like a genre throwback).

Currently halfway through Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality by Theodore Dalrymple, a writer I first encountered via Scott's controversial post "Radicalizing the Romanceless". As the title might suggest, he's a grumpy old man without apology, and his polemical ranting about how much modern Britain (and the Western world more generally) sucks is tremendous fun.

I needed something to read, and this might be it. Only a few pages in, and he's thrashing phonics, so he's on to something.

I just finished Ancient Law by Henry Sumner Maine, and am about to break into The Ancient City by de Coulanges.

I also finished Blood Meridian last week. I had taken kind of a long break before the final few chapters, so I wound up reading the whole thing again and finishing it.

Ancient Law was very interesting, taking it both as a piece of its time, and considering that the publisher I bought it from is openly reactionary. It was very much a book that I could see being easily read as a leftist piece, given that the author is quite happy to laud the perceived moral development of his then-Victorian society, and appears to be under the impression that the Kingdom of God on Earth will just keep getting closer and closer.

Maybe I’ll do a review of it at some point.

I'm reading Man And Woman He Created Them (aka the theology of the body) by John Paul II. The intro on the version I have was a doozy, like 180 pages. But I'm finally into the work proper, and that is easier going (mainly because it's smaller chunks so easier to digest).

I'm also reading Modernist Cuisine, after my wife unexpectedly bought it for me for my birthday. Ironically, I rather despise "modern" movements (in art but also in cuisine), because I find they get up their own asses seeking novelty without ever considering whether they have made something as good as the tradition they seek to distance themselves from (and more often than not, they haven't). So in theory I should hate the book. But I appreciate the sheer level of autism that goes into making something like this, and I think the photography is beautiful. I also appreciate that they have recipes that aren't trying to be creative and shocking, but are using modern techniques to make traditional dishes even better than before. So I'm enjoying the book well enough.

Their classic recipes are quite good. I think it is more than 2/3rds of all of them. And sous vide is a game changer for select proteins.

We have Modernist Cuisine at Home, which is an abridged adaptation for the home kitchen, and I also like the illustrations and the autism, but the thing that bugs my wife is how completely it discards existing culinary practices. "Out with pots and pans, in with pressure cookers, sous vide and blowtorches!"

The Food Lab ended up a much better purchase, since it tries to optimize existing culinary practices, not replace them with the new ones Bolshevik-style.

Yeah... my wife also got me Modernist Cuisine At Home for my birthday, because she's a crazy person lol. That was the one I actually wanted because I felt like it would be more useful to me, but I can't say I'm displeased to have the full set as well. The publisher claims that the at home volume has new content not taken from the larger set, so we'll see i guess.

The Food Lab is definitely on my list of books to get someday. I really respect Kenji's food writing (it's consistently very high quality), so I definitely want to read his book.

I’m about halfway through Anna Karenina. After that I’m finally gonna crack open Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.

I just finished Anna Karenina myself. There's a lot to chew on there, but some of the more interesting points for me were:

  • Despite the main dramatis personae all being high class, there's a big difference wealth differential between Vronsky, who has a really lavish lifestyle, and Dolly, who is basically just scraping by (and not, apparently, due to profligacy).
  • Tolstoy really seems to think that "subsistence" farming where the landowner is barely breaking even (or worse) is a totally reasonable state of affairs and the Russian way of farmwork is just not amenable even in principle to mechanization.

Tolstoy really seems to think that "subsistence" farming where the landowner is barely breaking even (or worse) is a totally reasonable state of affairs and the Russian way of farmwork is just not amenable even in principle to mechanization.

He really did think that. There's a short story by him that is quite explicit about his view. It's literally named How much land does a man need?. The classroom interpretation is of course that it's a story about the sin of greed, but it's not.

Why is this not about greed?

To be clear, I did not get the sense from Anna Karenina that Tolstoy was against large holdings per se. It's just that he didn't think that there's any point in trying to save labor or increase profits - you can do that on a large plot or on a small one. Levin certainly seems to have vast tracts of land - forests, fields, etc etc.

Just finished The Universe Within (Amaranthe book 22) by G.S. Jennsen and have moved on to Girlfriend in a Coma: The Novel by Douglas Coupland.

When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?

I've got 4 small kids (3 boys + 1 girl; only the girls is in diapers). We do a 2 hour road trip down to the grandparents about every other weekend. We always make them go to the bathroom before we leave, but we still have pee emergencies pretty much every trip.

For us, peeing on the side of the freeway is basically a must. If we try to find a proper bathroom, that's easily a 20+ minute detour. Driving to the bathroom is maybe 5 minutes, but then wrangling the problematic kid(s) is much more difficult in a dirty garage bathroom than on the side of the road. (I can't count the number of times I've had a kid wipe their junk on a public restroom toilet and then I have to do a serious disinfection...)

So my policy for side-of-road peeing is:

  1. It has to be safe to stop.

  2. There shouldn't be pedestrians around that can see us. (So this means no peeing on non-freeway type streets, and certain sections of freeway are also off limits.)

  3. There has to be "nature" to pee on. Some amount of grass/dirt is okay, but a tree is best. If we're on the stretch of the I5 in Irvine, where there's concrete everywhere, we won't stop. (This is partly related to pts 1+2.)

I realized on this week's roadtrip that I've never seen another car parked with the kids out peeing. Am I breaking some sort of major taboo here?

I'm also not sure what I'll do once the girl isn't wearing diapers, and whether I'll allow / force her to pee on the side of the road.

Roadway peeing is fine but does incrementally degrade the commons.

Also, it's unnecessary. If you have four kids, you're in an SUV or a minivan, so get a folding potty seat like a Potette and have the kids use it right in the back seat of the car. Potty gets lined, trash-can-style, with a plastic shopping bag (double up for security) plus an absorbent puppy pad or leftover diaper in the bottom of the bag, tie up the bag for easy discarding when everybody's done, and it's surprisingly tidy. Advantages are that it allows toilet paper use and works with #2 as well as #1.

fyi for when you're on foot, they also make pee pals for girls!

Pissing in a can in the back of the car feels more gross to me than people pissing on roadsides.

I do not long for these days, but there were times when my dad would have my brother or I pee in glass Coke bottles, presumably to save the time and keep driving. These bottles we would have to then balance carefully until he did pull over, at which point the pee-filled bottles he would have us place gingerly on the roadside, for some hapless cleaner-of-highway-shoulders to dispose of, I guess.

Ah, the 70s.

Whenever you need to.

Off of a rural lightly travel highway, exercises the ultimate freedom of living in a state of nature.

On a freeway, especially in heavy traffic I'd probably go for a large capacity wide mouth bottle. The large capacity is critical. You do not want to be at 90% full trying to cut off the stream. The main advantage, in addition to discretion, is you can possibly avoid having to exit and reenter traffic that way.

I have no experience trying it with kids, but it seems just unpleasant enough that they might heed your warning to limit fluid intake before the next 2 hour road trip. Not so unpleasant that it just seems mean.

For girls past training potty age, a fancy funnel might be an option? It can also be useful for nasty public bathrooms or when popping a squat is not a desirable option. e.g. peeing in the woods in the extreme cold. There are disposable versions that are basically cardboard with a plastic or wax coating. We keep a couple in the car for emergencies. My impression is that a reusable one called the "Shewee" is generally viewed favorably.

If you want a fancy bottle, "portable urinals" are surprisingly cheap. Some include an attachable funnel adapter. If you don't want to have to deal with dumping and rinsing a container at your destination, you can also buy pouches with absorbent gel. They seal when you are done with them and can be thrown discreetly into most ordinary trash.

When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?

Per my Alaskan upbringing — including a childhood where a 6-7 hour roadtrip across 220+ miles of road (one way), much of it winding two-lane mountain roads where it can be 80+ miles between gas stations, and there's often nowhere to pull off the road except the occasional gravel pit, was a common summer weekend activity — the answer was "whenever you can get far enough into the trees/bushes that someone on the road can't readily see you're doing so."

For me it's rather simple: It should be in a place no pedestrian would walk, independent of whether a pedestrian is currently present. Whether a pedestrian can see you from a distance doesn't matter, I wouldn't care.

As a adult man with no kids, I don't think there really are any hard and fast rules, only preferences.

My preference is already to pee in bathrooms. If that's impractical for some reason and I really need to, then I'll do it somewhere else. I would also prefer to do things like only on nature, at least a few yards into some woods, reasonably hard for others to see, etc, but then necessity and lack of availability of good options can override that.

Best recent example was during Covid times in NYC. For a while, it was legal for bars to serve drinks to pedestrians, but not to let anyone inside, so my friends and I would all walk around drinking. No bathrooms open anywhere means when you need to pee, you try to find somewhere reasonably low-traffic and discrete and do it. If you think this doesn't make a lot of sense, I agree, but I didn't make the rules. I guess that's the price for temporarily sort of containing a disease with a 99.9% survival rate (/s).

I have a daughter and a horror of many gas station bathrooms. We traveled (5-9 hour trips. Bathroom stops were required) with her training potty until we could be assured she could hold it long enough for us to find an appropriate bathroom. A girl sitting on a training potty on the side of the road with two car doors open is pretty much invisible to passers by.

I was taught to pee outdoors similarly to my older brother. Walk off the path / away from the road. Drop trou, squat and pee, paying attention to where your shoes are. If you need to, use a tree for balance. The annoying bit is packing out toilet paper. You really aren't exposing all that much when you do this. But if it really bothers you keep your daughter in dresses or skirts and teach her to squat, pull aside her undies, and go. Nothing gets bared. Girl swimmers are fantastic at this because taking off a wet racing suit is annoying.

Two hours isn't that long. If your daughter is old enough to be out of pull ups, she should be old enough to hold it for two hours. Don't give her a big cup of juice.

Don't give her a big cup of juice.

I imagine that the parents around here will laugh at me, but I had to learn this the hard way with my nephew. I took him to a monster truck show a couple years ago (so he was 6), and I was given the OK by my brother to let him have soda if he wanted. Which of course he did. So I let him drink a 20 oz soda, and then get started on another at intermission, and... yeah we went to the bathroom about every 10 minutes the entire rest of the show. It just never occurred to me how small of a bladder kids have, and how if you let them drink too much they're going to have to pee constantly. Live and learn!

Little boys can pee anywhere that nobody will mind, ideally with cover; adult men can pee outside where the bathroom would be an inconvenience and there’s sufficient cover and nobody will mind. Neither men nor boys can poop outside.

Girls and women can’t pee outside unless it’s a true emergency.

I don’t know anyone would be upset about your boys peeing into a bush on a rural property, as long as they’re not trespassing.

You probably do see cars pulled over but don't notice people peeing.

I typically aim for a space of at least 30-50 feet to walk off the road into nature to pee, and prefer the kind of cover where even a sharp eyed passerby would be unlikely to see my penis. This is an adult male consideration.

I do have friends who said they have never and would never pull over to the side of the road to pee so opinions differ. I've never in my life gotten into trouble over it. I laughed that my friends are very very occupied with setting up driving routes and times in order to manage bathroom breaks, where I am unconcerned.

My personal belief is that one of the main advantages of being a man is the right to pee pretty much anywhere as long as you're discreet. It hurts nobody and I actually think it's enjoyable. I wouldn't pee on a stranger's lawn but that's about my only limitation.

That said I am perplexed that you have an emergency every trip. My children regularly handle 10+ hour road trips with no issues, and they have their own water bottles. It's also never a 20 minute detour for a gas station for me, maybe 3 minutes.

I think some kids/families are just biologically different. When any of my kids were under 4, I was nervous when we hit a stretch of highways with more than 30 minutes until the next gas station. Some people just gotta go when they gotta go.

My younger kid is like that - she doesn't want to go unless she's actually experiencing the "gotta go right now!" feeling, and will argue and get mad if any adult tells her, "go now regardless, we'll be on the road two hours and I don't want to have to make pit stops."

The arguing is what drives me nuts. It's surely karma for my behavior at that age.

kids are the ultimate karma - no matter what pissed off others about you, you will get to experience it all day, everyday, in a mini-mirror.

Are their any non-religious organizations whose members take vows oaths of celibacy, a la the Night's Watch or the Maesters from ASOIAF?

(I'm pretty sure the answer is "no," but I'd like to double-check my bases so I can be more certain in replying as such the next time someone "advises" me to "go join the Night's Watch" or similar.)

(Edited per @FiveHourMarathon's fine pedantry.)

I believe there is a kind of consensus around celibacy within certain radical feminist communities—particularly the 6B4T framework.

It stands for:

No marriage with men. No dating men. No giving birth to children with men. No sex with men. Reject the corset. Reject the image promoted by otaku culture. Reject idol culture. Reject religion.

Women in this community are, in a sense, committed to celibacy. That said, the movement is highly decentralized, so it’s difficult to categorize it as a religious organization in any traditional sense.

Nothing permanent, as the whole concept of a vow is illogical for a non religious organization.

It is often difficult to distinguish a vow from an oath. A vow is an oath, but an oath is only a vow if the divine being is the recipient of the promise and is not merely a witness.

TIL. However, I assume Capital_Room is among those who don't care about the distinction.

I, too, don't really care about the distinction. Absent possible divine punishment, the concept of a promise of celibacy or chastity is kind of ridiculous. It fails often enough with the possibility of divine punishment!

This isn't just limited to celibacy: without divine witness, a promise is just a promise. "Words are wind" to stick with the GRRM theme of the thread.

It fails often enough with the possibility of divine punishment!

In my view this means that vows are unserious things, not that promises are.

a promise is just a promise

This is an annoying thing to read; an aggravating sentiment to encounter. It seems not alright for a promise to be "just a promise". Yet it's something that very many take to be obvious and true - but then why have promises at all? Promises should be a foundational social institution, not a nonsensical rhetorical flourish like the by-now codifiedly useless literally/"literally" distinction. Breaking a promise should be a big deal.

That vows are impossible in secular society and that someone can say a thing like "just a promise" without getting tarred and feathered is a serious failing of modernity.

...it's always been that way, hasn't it?

...it's always been that way, hasn't it?

We've never had a society without an imprimatur of the divine that would guard the concept of promises, so I don't think it has always been this way. Our purely materialist Capitalist worldview puts no value on honesty beyond a market value, which can always be ignored for the right price.

In my mind the modern failure of the concepts of honor and honesty relates back to Marx's idea that Capitalism subsists on the free gifts of human nature. Our society is falling apart because Capitalism is parasitic upon values that existed before and outside of Capitalism. Once people fully adopt Capitalism as a value system, Capitalism can no longer function. Eg: Capitalism requires people to have children to become workers/consumers/etc.; but on a rational Capitalist profit/loss basis it makes little sense to have children.

In the same way, Capitalism requires that we have a way to break promises, Bankruptcy is an important Capitalist innovation allowing for people to break their promises and move on with their lives and continue as producers and consumers after finding themselves unable to keep their promises. But, it only works where people wanted to keep their promises for other reasons extraneous to Capitalism. Once Bankruptcy becomes sufficiently not-shameful that a former bankrupt can become President of the United States after fleecing his creditors, the laws function differently.

Without any reference to the divine, a promise is only to be kept inasmuch as it is beneficial to keep it, and the moment it isn't beneficial there is no reason to keep it. People used to swear by their hope of heaven and fear of hell, implying that breaking the promise would lead to divine punishment; if someone did that today I'd think they were having a laugh.

...it's always been that way, hasn't it?

I don't think so. My Eastoid mind has been blown several times by how much of the Western system relied / relies on an honor system, and then blown even more by how it was actually working until recently.

I just caught myself paying in full at the self-service, honor-based work cafeteria. This is not a major insight, but I had to think of your post.

Those vegetable stands that farmers put up at the side of the road, as though they were thinking "Would someone do such a thing? Just take stuff without paying for it?", were one of the most beautiful things I've seen when I was in Bavaria.

We have flower fields just like that. You go in, pick flowers, then pay at a piggy bank. Seems idyllic, right? They felt the need to put up a security camera.

There's a farmer's store, integrated into the farm building itself, in the next village. Used to be you'd walk in through the open door, take what you like, calculate the sum you need to pay, then put it into a piggy bank and walk out again with your goods. They recently had to install an electronic lock that only opens to valid debit cards.

These things are fragile. All it takes is one flagrant defector, and they cease to be viable.

Unmanned vegetable stands have become rare. The only ones I still see regularly are for potatoes.

Not that it answers your question, but technically the Night's Watch doesn't take a vow of celibacy. They promise to take no wife and father no children, not to abstain from sex.

Celibacy is no marriage, chastity is no sex. Don't worry even Catholics get it wrong a lot (and rise of the incorrect term Incel has furthered that misunderstanding)

My understanding is that chastity is no sex outside of marriage, but inside marriage is fine. i.e. all Christians (married or not) are called to chastity but they are encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse.

Then again my understanding might be mistaken. I definitely don't claim to be an authority on that. Fair point about celibacy, I got sloppy and was just using the common sense of the word even though I should know better.

They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse", that's new age degeneracy. It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers. But because humans are so weak, the married are supposed to occasionally close their eyes and think of canaan so their spouse does not engage in sexual intercourse with lucifer or other people, which would be like, so much more disgusting.

1 Corinthians 7: 1 Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse", that's new age degeneracy. It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers.

This is definitely not true, at least for Catholicism. My source is that I just recently went through the pre cana process (for those who don’t know, this is the Catholic marriage preparation, basically a retreat where you do various activities with your soon-to-be-spouse alongside other couples; it was a very good experience actually, happy to explain more to the curious) and they were very clear that a husband and wife are supposed to enjoy sex together. Sex is a hugely important part of romantic attraction and the general human experience, not to mention for procreation, and God made it feel good for a reason. You’re just not supposed to enjoy with people other than your spouse, or while using contraception other than cycle-tracking methods (of which the church offers a surprisingly robust suite of resources to help with, including services like biomarker tracking to help precisely identify a woman’s fertility cycle; they also included an array of secular scientific studies showing good success rates for the methods, I found it all very interesting). I admittedly can’t cite the biblical references off my head but I can tell you with absolute certainty that the Official Church StanceTM is that sex is good, actually.

Edit: reading further down the page I see that @urquan has included a key term I forgot to use, which summarizes the position and reconciles the attitude that “sex is good” with the attitude that “celibacy/chastity is good”. Marriage is, in and of itself, a vocation in the religious sense. There’s a reason it’s a sacrament after all. The priesthood, of course, is also a vocation. Priests are not “missing out” on something religious by being celibate and unmarried, nor are married couples “missing out” on part of the religion by not becoming priests and nuns instead. They are simply two different callings.

They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse", that's new age degeneracy. It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers.

That's not true at all. For one thing, the Song of Solomon (in the Old Testament!) is really sexual (I mean, by biblical standards) and is a good example that the Bible considers sex between married couples to be a praiseworthy thing to be enjoyed.

But also, your cited verses directly work against your claim. Paul never claims that sex is disgusting or bad, and in fact explicitly says that couples should engage in it! He does say it is better to be single and focus on God, but acknowledges that not everyone is equipped for that. If you choose to read disgust into that, that's your interpretation and not something supported by the text.

I read it as: it's one spouse's duty to release the other's demons. It's not about you, it's not about having fun, it's a means to an end. I have my own biases, but I don't buy the christian counseling websites spin of 1 corinthians 7 to be a 60s hippy pro-sex message. Cite me some pre-20th century catholic authority that encourages sexual pleasure in marriage.

I read it as: it's one spouse's duty to release the other's demons.

You should read it like this: It’s one spouse’s duty to help the other fulfill their sexual needs, so that they aren’t tempted to have sex outside the marriage. Millions of dead bedrooms, affairs, resentments, and divorces speak to the wisdom of this provision. If you hate the idea of a sexless marriage, like most people do, St. Paul is simply agreeing with you!

It’s true that Christianity places a high premium on celibacy. But the married have their calling and their vocation, which Paul, though he advises celibacy to those who will accept it, also praises in the highest terms, as an image of Christlike love. And the superiority of celibacy over marriage is also a provision confirmed by experience: not all wish for marriage, not all wish for the responsibility of a relationship. And where the celibate are not celebrated, they are vilified, rejected: see hatred directed towards spinsters, incels, communities not knowing what to do with single people with no interest in marriage, etc.

You can view the Christian approach to sex, particularly historically, as repression. You can view it that way, and even twist yourself into knots interpreting the holy text through the most uncharitable angle, rather than trying to grasp, with sincerity, what was meant and what is understood by it. You’re free to do so. But given what has happened — the conflicts, social upheaval, bitter divorces, mass loneliness, party culture, hookup culture that has resulted from unrestrained sexual norms — I would rather advise looking at Christian sexual norms as a bulwark against grave danger.

You can disagree, or you can even offer a more refined ethic that prizes sexual restraint without restricting sex to marriage, but what I often see is people criticizing Christian moderationism towards sex and offering as its alternative the spirit of the 60s, which is facing mass rejection because it holds up a carrot of free love and sexual pleasure, but gives few people what they actually want. St. Paul, by contrast, says: “you should love one another as yourself, and you should make it an important part of your life — even a duty! — to aid your spouse in fulfilling their sexual needs.” In what sense is this not wisdom?

To the degree that the christian sexuality norms can work for a society, they do so in the compromises, between the cracks, of the true christian vision, which is just anti-sex asceticism. Like paul’s ‘ok fine, if you have to, I guess you can fuck your wife’. Or Thomas aquinas borrowing of pagan aristoteles’ sexual ideas rather than augustine’s. Or all the priests who looked away when young people had sex, or when married men went to prostitutes. That was christian sexuality norms’ finest hour, when they did not insist upon themselves, but accomodated human nature.

On the contrary: cite me somewhere in the Bible (or authoritative interpretation of it, e.g. Catholic Tradition) which says that sex is bad and not to be enjoyed. The burden of proof is on you here, especially given that the evidence you already cited (Paul) doesn't say what you claim it does. Otherwise, it seems self-evident to me that God would not have made something so fundamentally part of our nature feel good to us if he didn't intend for us to enjoy it. Much like the taste of good food or the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed in their proper context, so is the pleasure of sex. It makes no sense otherwise.

Otherwise, it seems self-evident to me that God would not have made something so fundamentally part of our nature feel good to us if he didn't intend for us to enjoy it

Counterpoint: It also feels good to dominate other human beings, but I don't believe God intended for us to enjoy that.

Now, match "domination" to "sex", combine that with the degree that marriage is inherently an exclusive prostitution agreement for sociobiological reasons, mix that with a generally-productive instinct for men to do this sexually more often... and now you know why traditionalists have an emergent, adversarial relationship with sex. For progressives, mix that with the female zero-sum social game, and the result is "yes, all men do that for power reasons, and they all do it on purpose".

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Aquinas views sexual pleasure in marriage as necessary, natural and good. Going to the sex act with one’s spouse strictly for the pleasure is a sin, but sexual pleasure within marriage and the marital act is a positive.

For Augustine every sex act not for procreation is a sin. Augustine never left any space for healthy sexual desire after the fall. Thomas Aquinas follows Augustine’s opinion when he says that sexuality exists for the sake of propagation and for the strengthening of the marriage bond between a man and a woman. So here again there’s the idea that sexuality is just an instrument, and there’s no inherent value in physical sexual enjoyment itself.

But then Thomas also borrows from Aristoteles’ view that the spiritual and the physical are closely related to each other instead of in conflict, and that reason should ‘coach’ our desires instead of suppressing them, and so accepts that the physical-sensual part of the person has its own longings and joy. Sensual pleasure is good for the physical-sensual and therefore for the entire person.

So I think it's pretty confusing under what circumstances you're allowed to enjoy yourself. As a byproduct mostly.

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They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse"

Yes we are.

that's new age degeneracy.

No it isn't. Have you read Song of Solomon?

It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers. But because humans are so weak, the married are supposed to occasionally close their eyes and think of canaan so their spouse does not engage in sexual intercourse with lucifer or other people, which would be like, so much more disgusting.

That is a blatant misreading of the quoted passage, which specifically states that sex should be a regular part of married life, and that a major goal of this sexual activity is gratification of your partner. The Bible contains numerous depictions of erotic love portrayed as a positive good, and again, there is an entire book of erotic poetry right there in the middle. You are quoting the one passage most conducive to your desired distortion and portraying it as normative, hoping that people won't notice that this passage is an outlier and that even as an outlier it still doesn't say what you want it to say. It's also ignoring the passage's historical context: whatever your thoughts on when and by who it was actually written, the text is explicitly framed as advice for people who are about to undergo an attempted extermination by the Roman state. Having a spouse and children doesn't make it easier to handle imprisonment, torture or execution for your faith.

Nor is it necessary to approach this question from pure theory; it's pretty simple to reduce this to an empirical question and just look at surveys of sexual satisfaction, in which conservative Christians score highly.

Sure, but the relevant canon regarding celibacy actually says ‘clerics in the Roman rite are obliged to perfect and perpetual continence’- it doesn’t use either word.

Little by little my Nook ST is beginning to wear out so I'm thinking about what I should look for when it's time to buy a new one. What are some of your must have features / biggest annoyances / missed opportunities in e-readers?

It's table stakes but I still love having an instant dictionary. Instant translation would be nice. Instant wikipedia would be good too. The more quick-look-up reference resources the better.

I like the idea of bookmarks and highlights/margin notes but I don't use them as they're not well implemented, for example when moving books between devices and different software. That raises the issue of software and hardware. Call me old school but I'm a firm believer in removable local storage as a means to preserve data should the device fail.

Not once have I wanted to install additional apps. I also don't particularly care about having a fancy OS/UI since I spend 99.999% of the time inside the book, not outside. I guess that audiobooks could be a relevant feature but I never listen to them and it's a slippery slope to podcasts, music, and just using a fully featured tablet. Ideally there would be a read-out-loud feature that used the ebook as the source rather than a separate audio file, and I imagine it's not far off if it hasn't been done already but again it feels like that would require a much more powerful device for only marginal benefit.

If you want to invest, there are options for fancy ones I don’t know much about, but for me the kindle paperwhite is easily hits the perfect portability price and convenience factor combination. Also press and hold brings up the dictionary on a word, just confirmed. Recommend to buy a nice leather case for it - some also have grips on the back side you can even fasten them sorta to your hand! Adds to the feel though some might like the original size and thinness. Brightness and color temperature settings are good as well. And apparently the new version is a bit more responsive too

I have a Kobo and I can't recommend anything else. It has an integrated dictionary and basically no other functionality besides reading books (though it does have those annotation features you said you don't use). It supposedly has an associated store, but I've never used it. I bought it because it's the only reader I'm aware of that allows you to sideload books on it without jailbreaking it. That and they made a sensibly-priced waterproof version before anyone else.

I bought it because it's the only reader I'm aware of that allows you to sideload books on it without jailbreaking it.

Books can be side loaded onto Kindles too, but the process is a little awkward (you have to send an email with the book attached to a special email address).

Can't you just use them as flash drive? At least you could just upload trough USB until 2018-sh

Maybe, I haven't tried that.

You can also find 3rd party OSes (KOReader, Plato) that work noticeably better than stock.

Dictionary? Translation? I guess, but in the current year, if you're not running every page through Claude to see what you missed, what are you doing?

Like an idiot I'm still running every page through 5434a at 1x speed.

You say UI doesn't matter, but Amazon's enshittification of the Kindle OS is a crime. My library is buried beneath ads.

As others have said I only read pirated books now. I don't trust publishers as license holders/DRM so being able to easily side load is key.

What ads are you talking about? I just got a new Kindle, and I don't see any ads at all. Just go to Library on the front page, it stays there, and you only see your actual books and their contents. If you go to the Home page, you see some recommendations, which I suppose you could consider ads, but it doesn't ever seem to switch over to that from Library by itself.

Of course, there is the option to save a few bucks on the purchase price in exchange for seeing ads. I hate ads as much as anyone, but I don't have a lot of sympathy if somebody takes the $20 cheaper option for ads and then complains about the ads.

You're correct that I purchased a subsidized Kindle. However the ads have gotten more obtrusive as updates have come in, and the subsidization is ONLY for the lock screen. You still get ads embedded in the OS, they're roughly 75% of the screen real estate.

It's honestly horrible.

I've never seen an ad on my kindle at all.

Are you talking about the "Home" screen recommendations? I agree that it's an annoying layout, but don't you have the "Library" page too? On mine, that shows only your books, with a bunch of layout options. Mine also never actually goes to the "Home" screen unless I actually tap on Home to go there, so I only really ever see the "Library" page. So it doesn't really seem like that big of a deal to me.

Agreeing to pay less than the normal price in exchange for seeing ads is one thing, but it does bug me when the big providers pull a "we are changing the deal", like Amazon Prime video's apparent stance that they will actually start showing ads unless you agree to pay them even more. Fortunately, for now at least, uBlock Origin Lite, which is Manifest V3 compatible, works fine at blocking them, and YouTube ads too.

It's a widely held opinion around here that ads that can be removed for a nominal payment still constitute a violation of one's human rights.

I've never used a Kindle, the Nook is my first and only e-reader and jail breaking it was the first order of business. If I couldn't sideload pirated files and had to view (spits) ads I'd have stuck to acoustic books.

Those features are so essential that I take them for granted and so forgot to include them in the OP. Is there a reason you haven't jail broken it? I only did a quick search but it seems doable.

You say UI doesn't matter, but Amazon's enshittification of the Kindle OS is a crime. My library is buried beneath ads.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS. I have a huge Kindle library that I read through, and I personally find that Fire tablets are cheap and serviceable enough to serve as my readers but even with the ability to cut out the ads the experience has steadily declined. I still love to buy books to support the "independent" authors that I like rather than subscribing to Kindle Unlimited but even so, Amazon seems to have their fingers in every piece of that pie as well, be it books from 47 North or serials from Royal Road curated into Kindle books, and the bookstore itself is utter shite to browse now that every. Single. Damn. Page. Consists of about 25% of the same four "sponsored" books at the top and bottom of each page.

The latest Kindles have very dim amber backlight settings, which are very useful when I wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall asleep but don't want to wake up my wife.

For me it is always display second is support of sideload of books. That are the only really important features. Even for books i own, usually I read pirated versions anyway.

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